Preliminary Production - Evaluation

Over the past few weeks I have taken part in the preliminary production task which involved a group of us filming, starring in and editing our own short films. This short film has taught us the basics of film making and the good and bad points. This involved us taking shots from several different camera angles as well as different shots to emphasise different points in the story and pick the right shots for the corresponding scenes. During this exercise I have learned many different things. Not only about filming, but also the different techniques used when filming and which shot size or angle to use for the appropriate scene. I also learned the importance of correct camera positioning including the use of a tripod to make certain scenes look fluent and to have a good sense of continuity. I also learned how important the editing process was. This has showed me that no matter how good the filming is and how effective the camera angles and shot sizes were, without a good standard of editing these shots can be useless and look ineffective. When taking part in this task, one of the main points that went well was the actual filming itself. We managed to use a good variety of different shots and by filming scenes several times we were able to choose the best scenes to make our film look effective. The fact that we filmed several different scenes from different angles allowed us to choose which one we thought was the best and most appropriate angle to fit in with the scenes which preceded them. One point which went wrong with our filming task was the fact that we did not take into account the sound that was picked up when recording. For some of the scenes (particularly the ones that involved dialogue) we did not assess the sound that was picked up and some of the scenes that involved speech came out a bit quieter than we envisaged. We should have reviewed every scene before we started the editing process to ensure that no further time was lost. However we re-recorded these scenes to ensure that the sound was up to standard so that it would fit in with the rest of the film. Although this did solve our problem, it was quite time consuming and we had to record around four scenes all over again which did make filming the next scenes quite rushed. In my opinion, the best thing that I took part in and accomplished was the actual filming. I filmed several scenes for our short film and thought that they went quite well. This involved me taking several different shots of the people in the film from several different angles to fit in with the current situation. When editing the scenes at the end, we used several different editing techniques such as fade, dissolve and wipe. In conclusion, the overall task did go quite well as we managed to get the task all completely done within the allocated time and no scenes or important shots were missed. We managed to put all the scenes together and use editing software to make the film seem more realistic which worked out quite well. Apart from our sound and audio trouble the task went quite well and we successfully managed to film the task that was asked of us.